Developments in network technology and media content (e.g., images, video, and audio) storage, delivery, and playback are re-shaping the entertainment, information technology, and consumer electronics industries. With these developments, there are an increasing number of applications for associating media content with auxiliary data. The auxiliary data may provide information describing the content, copy control information or instructions, links to related content, machine instructions, etc. This auxiliary data is sometimes referred to as metadata. In many applications, metadata suffers from the drawback that it is vulnerable to becoming separated from an associated media signal.
Steganography provides a way to embed data in the media signal. As such, it offers an advantage over conventional ways to associate metadata with media signals. Examples of steganography include digital watermarking and data glyphs. Exemplary watermarking techniques suitable for still image and video content are shown in U.S. U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,260 to Rhoads and U.S. Pat. No. 5,915,027 to Cox. Exemplary watermarking techniques suitable for use with audio content are shown in the just cited Rhoads patent, as well as U.S. Pat. No. 5,945,932 to Smith and U.S. Pat. No. 5,940,135 to Petrovic.
Advances in computer and wireless networking, multimedia coding, and higher bandwidth communication links are creating many new ways to distribute and enjoy multimedia content, such as music and movies. Coding formats for audio like MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3) have already caused significant changes in music delivery to consumers. Despite the advances in technology, content distributors and broadcasters still need to address how to effectively promote and sell content.
This document describes systems and processes for linking audio and other multimedia data objects with metadata and actions via a communication network, e.g., computer, broadcast, wireless, etc. Media objects are transformed into active, connected objects via identifiers embedded into them or their containers. These identifiers can be embedded by the owner or distributor of the media object, or automatically created from the media object. In the context of a user's playback experience, a decoding process extracts the identifier from a media object and possibly additional context information and forwards it to a server. The server, in turn, maps the identifier to an action, such as returning metadata, re-directing the request to one or more other servers, requesting information from another server to identify the media object, etc. If the identifier has no defined action, the server can respond with an option for the user to buy the link and control the resulting action for all objects with the current identifier. The linking process applies to broadcast objects as well as objects transmitted over networks in streaming and compressed file formats.
Further features will become apparent with reference to the following detailed description and accompanying drawings.